Aide: Obama trying to fight GOP efforts to halt progress

Monday

May 20, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 20, 2013 at 1:56 PM

A senior adviser to President Barack Obama mounted a combative defense of the administration yesterday, saying the controversies enveloping the White House are the result of Republican lawmakers trying to "drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped-up hearings and false allegations."

A senior adviser to President Barack Obama mounted a combative defense of the administration yesterday, saying the controversies enveloping the White House are the result of Republican lawmakers trying to “drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped-up hearings and false allegations.”

The remarks came from Dan Pfeiffer, a member of the president’s inner circle, as he appeared on all five major Sunday-morning talk shows in an effort to move the administration past what commentators have described as a “hell week” of controversy and missteps. He pointedly rejected Republican criticisms of the president’s actions and leadership style as “offensive” and “absurd,” and he said the administration will not be distracted from doing the nation’s business.

In his appearances, Pfeiffer faced often tough questioning over the furors regarding the Internal Revenue Service’s targeted reviews of conservative groups; the lethal attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in September; and the Justice Department’s seizure of journalists’ records.

He repeatedly accused Republicans of exploiting the three issues for political purposes, even as he urged them to work with the administration on legislation to revamp the immigration system and trim the budget deficit.

His warning against “fishing expeditions” came when he was asked on the CBS program Face the Nation about a remark by the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, who had told The New York Times that he had instructed staff not to spend more than 10 percent of their time on the three controversies.

The program’s host, Bob Schieffer, asked whether that meant that the White House does not take the issues seriously.

“Oh, no. Absolutely not,” Pfeiffer said. “There are some very serious issues here, particularly the IRS, where there was inexcusable conduct that needs to be fixed. And that’s going to happen.” But Pfeiffer said the president and his staff need to keep “actually doing the people’s work and fighting for the middle class.”

Republicans appearing on yesterday’s shows insisted that they will be aggressive in pushing for fuller investigations, particularly of the IRS and Benghazi matters. The administration has promised to cooperate.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said on Fox News Sunday that investigators examining the IRS scandal need to answer key questions: “Who knew? When did they know? Why did they do this? How high up in government did it go?”

Ryan, a member of the Ways and Means Committee, which held an often-testy hearing into the IRS matter on Friday, said Americans have lost confidence in their government, adding, “This is arrogance of power, abuse of power, to the nth degree.”

Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., who is also on the committee, said that an inspector general’s review of the IRS released last week — it largely blamed ineffective IRS management for the undue scrutiny of tea party groups — was “just the beginning of this process.”

Pfeiffer tried to clarify a key point — Ryan’s “when did they know” — about exactly when Obama learned that an IRS unit had given extra scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. The president’s response to a reporter’s question on Thursday had seemed open to interpretation.

But Pfeiffer said repeatedly yesterday that the president had learned about the matter only weeks ago. That was appropriate, Pfeiffer said, given the importance of insulating the IRS from White House pressures.

Pfeiffer made the administration’s Republican critics the prime target of his anger. “There is no question Republicans are trying to make political hay here,” he said of the IRS scandal. And regarding Benghazi, he said on Fox: “There’s a series of conspiracy theories the Republicans have been spinning about this since the night it happened.”

When Chris Wallace, the Fox host, pressed Pfeiffer to explain exactly what Obama was doing on Sept. 11 as reports emerged of the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi — specifically, whether the president had gone to the White House’s Situation Room to monitor events — Pfeiffer dismissed the question as irrelevant and rejected what he said was an implication of presidential inattention. Four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the attack.

“The assertions from Republicans here that somehow the president allowed this to happen and didn’> > > > > > > > t take action is offensive,” Pfeiffer said, adding, “There’s no evidence to support it.”

The leader of Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, picked up on a recent GOP theme by casting the scandals as symptoms of a deeper problem. “There is a culture of intimidation through the administration,” he said on the NBC News program Meet the Press. “The IRS is just the most-recent example.”

The president has insisted that it would have been wrong to be involved earlier in the IRS matter or to interfere with the Justice Department’s investigation into leaks that led to the seizure of the journalists’ records. That has provoked criticism that his management style leans too far in the other direction — so detached as to be ineffectual.

Pfeiffer brusquely dismissed those suggestions.

“I think that’s an absurd proposition,” he said on Fox, adding, “What would be a real problem is if he was involved in those cases.”

Pfeiffer said that a cardinal rule of the presidency is, “you don’t get involved with independent investigations, and you don’t give the appearance of doing so.”

Some Republicans have sought to link the IRS scandal to their concerns about the president’s health-care law, calling for Sarah Hall Ingram, who had headed the IRS section involved in the tax-exempt determinations, to be relieved of her current role in carrying out that law.

Pfeiffer said no such step should be taken before a monthlong investigation ordered by the new acting IRS commissioner is completed. “No one has suggested that she did anything wrong yet,” he said.

But Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said he did not think the IRS review will suffice. “I think a special counsel is going to wind up being necessary,” he said on the ABC News program This Week.

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